Meg Greenfield Quotes

It is true the orator may make a myriad replica of his own passion out of those who listen to him. But that does not prove he is right or they are not fools.

This shuffling trick of misstating the question, and setting up a man of straw to make a pompous demonstration of knocking him down, is the measure of the capacity of [Congressman] Edward Black and of the majority of the House [of Representatives].

Arguments that prove too much prove nothing.

Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument.

Sophistry, like poison, is at once detected and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form; but a fallacy which, when stated barely in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world, if diluted in a quarto volume.

Analogy cannot serve as proof.

A good debater is not necessarily an effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent's argument through which you could drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue - which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.

If the reason I give is a good one, you will act upon it. If it is a bad one I cannot make it better by piling epithet upon epithet. There is no logic in abuse; there is no argument in an epithet.

It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid—in which case all comment is superfluous—or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

Power comes through public persuasion.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

Hyperbole engaged in consciously to achieve a desired effect can be, as we have noted, a useful rhetorical tool. Indeed, its use in this manner is sometimes called "exaggeration in the service of truth." However, there's much to be said for restraint of tongue and pen, and restraint refers not only to what we say but also to how we say it. It is possible, believe it or not, to be emphatic without indulging in overstatement; it is possible to be forceful without exaggerating.

If you can’t fit your argument on a bumper sticker, you’ve lost the debate.

There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

Political speeches are a particularly low form of rhetoric.

Sometimes a song becomes rhetoric, but you have to really empathise. You also have to leave room for both sides of the argument: even if you're not telling the other side, you have to put that part in parentheses and make sure it's understood.

As a Shakespeare character, if you can persuade someone in a sentence or a speech, you've got it right.

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.

Regardless of how lyrical or rhetorically gifted they are in conveying big ideas, any candidate can do a good job of giving a speech if the goal of a speech is more than just delivering it well but achieving some end, whether it's convincing people of some issue or persuading them about you as a person.

I was on the debate team.

I want to win every debate and I think I do.

At the Oxford Union I'd never debated before but I gave it a go.

A lot of people ask me, did debating help me as a writer, and I honestly don't know.

I consider myself to be quite persuasive when I want.